In today's digital society organizations depend on having ready access to their data. Data, however, can be lost in a variety of ways such as through disasters and catastrophes (e.g., fires or flooding), media failures (e.g., disk crash), computer viruses, accidental deletion, and so forth. Thus, it is important that the data be backed up. An organization may have an immense amount of data that is critical to the organization's operation. Backing up data and subsequently recovering backed up data, however, can involve large amounts of computing resources such as network bandwidth, processing cycles, and storage due to the complexity of data to be backed up and the amount of data that is backed up.
In some cases, it is desirable to selectively backup one or more individual files of a volume in a mountable format in order to, for example, speed recoveries, enable the replay of logs, and ensure data consistency. Excluding other files in the volume from the backup helps to conserve computing resources because a backup of a single file (or subset of files) in the volume is faster than backing up the entire volume. Computing resources such as network bandwidth and storage on the backup media will also be conserved. It is also desirable to perform incremental backups of a particular file so that changes to the file are also backed up. Further, having a full backup of a file in a mountable format (e.g., can be assigned a drive letter and accessed through the computer's file system) helps to ensure a smooth recovery and reduce administrative overhead.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Restorer, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of EMC Corporation.